


Falls the Shadow

by It_MightBe_Love



Series: Hollow World [2]
Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-01
Updated: 2019-10-01
Packaged: 2020-11-09 11:43:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20852879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/It_MightBe_Love/pseuds/It_MightBe_Love
Summary: Janet Drake loves at a distance, with a calculating eye and a quelling word to the careless. She did not teach her son to love, she taught him tosee, andthat, at the end of the day, is the more important lesson.





	Falls the Shadow

**Author's Note:**

> Loosely proofread and unbeta'd

Inversely, if it had been Janet Drake to survive rather than Jack, her return to Gotham would have been met with less fanfare. Concealed and redirected so as to permit her the quickest transition back into the social elite.

She is not surprised to find Tim keeping company with the Wayne’s. 

Janet has never been surprised by her son, he is a Rothschild through and through. Possessed of her same mercurial gaze and cupid’s bow mouth. 

Janet has always known she is not possessed of the right kind of caring for her son. She and Jack were partners in business, their marriage was simply a continuation of that. Timothy was a means to an end. A perpetuation of both his parents legacies. A carefully constructed combination of genetics and education, and the pure, brilliant luck that he would be born in possession of both parents aptitude for learning and adapting.

They were neither of them prepared or equipped for a child. Nannies took their place, a housekeeper so the hearth and kitchen were always full and warm. They traveled and left Timothy to the care and keeping of those better able to give a child what he needed.

(It will be years before Janet realizes that this had been a mistake and a misstep. Too many years too late to correct but not too many to seek forgiveness for).

Janet does not die because the Obeah Man miscalculates. The mistake is his, but the coma it puts her in is her own. Three years lost to the fugue of a medical bed. She wakes between breaths and heartbeats and startles the long term care nurse into dropping her chart.

Timothy is fifteen. 

Gotham has not changed.

Janet knows there are things she has been willfully ignorant of. Her sons misadventures in childhood, the bruised ribs and broken bones. The empty hallways of their home. His desperate loneliness, the way he has sought any kind of affirmation in the form of bruised knucklebone fighting and the shadow of the Bat.

Janet approves less of the company Tim keeps, than that of his nightly activities. 

It should come as no surprise then, that she disapproves even more so of the illegitimate Wayne than perhaps Timothy does. (She only once encounters the boy when he is still young. Freshly into adolescence, over a private luncheon on the Wayne Manor lawn. It is a contentiously open secret that Janet is as aware of the Wayne family activities as Timothy is. Damian is permitted a single snide remark as to his efficacy and place and Janet levels the icy stare she learned from her own mother on the boy and says, “He hardly requires the approval of a child. He is a _Rothschild_, and we are far superior to the Wayne Family.”

They may be Gotham immigrants, old New York money and reputation, but New Jersey is separated by only a river and the turnpike. She lofts an eyebrow in a move she has seen her son emulate and watches the Wayne child’s face constrict.

“He has never needed to be a _Wayne_, and it is arrogant to assume he has ever _wished_ to be one.”

Years later, she will repeat this to Damian on his wedding day, and she will end the speech with a thinly veiled threat. She is all the more frightening for her power amongst the mundanities of their world outside the vigilante community. Damian has been taught, if nothing else, to respect women in power).

There is little Janet doesn’t see or know. She takes in the world in much the same way her son does. In parts and pieces until they have cascaded into the whole. She has seen her son outthink and outsmart men twice his age and formal education, all while dancing on the tight-wire precipice of danger that comes part and parcel with being a vigilante crime fighter.

Life happens.

Life always happens, and she is still as distant a maternal figure as she ever was. Her circle of influence almost entirely contained to the political, to business. To ensuring that her son does not want for the things she is unable to give him.

He has utility to her legacy. It does not mean she does not love him. 

She does. 

Rothschild women simply love differently. Her grandmother once described it as a curse on the women of their family. A hundred or more years previous, in the Old Country, a Rothschild woman loved the wrong man and paid the price for it with a broken heart and a broken home. The man did not live to see the end of the year. The women simply stopped loving. 

She has never needed to interfere in Tim’s crimefighting lifestyle. Not when Bruce Wayne outright tried to adopt Timothy, not when Captain Boomerang attempted to kill her. Not when the League of Assassins began showing up on her doorstep. 

Her Timothy has always been independent, and he loves as fiercely as he breathes and fights. The world comes perilously close to ending, he nearly dies.

He becomes an adult in the eyes of the law and she misses it. On the other side of the world because she has always loved him best at a great distance. She returns to Gotham and lets herself accept an invitation to lunch. The address Timothy gives her is not to the tacky theatre the papers had reported he purchased to convert into a house, but a tidy brownstone on a quiet street in an even quieter neighborhood in one of the few decent areas of Gotham.

It is soft, and warm, and cozy inside. Warm wood floors, creamy walls. Artfully cluttered and cleverly decorated. Her son looks a stiff wind away from falling apart and she reaches deep into the pit of her stomach to dredge up some kind of care and cups his face. Thumbs stroking over the sharp imprint of his cheekbones.

They are of a height these days flat-footed. Janet has never seen her son look so _small_. 

She says, “If they hurt you again, I will ruin them,” and presses her mouth like a benediction to his brow. She lets him fall apart in her arms. Shoulders shuddering like an unmoored skiff. Great shaking sobs that slowly peter out until he can recompose himself. Rebuild the Rothschild mask he has affected since childhood to protect his most tender parts.

He swallows once and Janet nods. “Good.”

It isn’t easy, and it is certainly not kind, the life G*d has seen fit to grant her son, but there are moments. Those rare sunny Gotham days on the Wayne Manor lawn, when she sees Timothy unfurl like a flower seeking sunlight. Seeking the hand of a loved one at the seat of his spine. 

When he does not seem so small, and Janet cannot bring herself to regret the mistakes she made in his infancy. Janet Drake has never been possessed of a particularly motherly air. She is not capable of the cosseting, coddling tenderness which society sees fit to set as standard for motherhood.

Janet Drake loves at a distance, with a calculating eye and a quelling word to the careless. She did not teach her son to love, she taught him to _see_, and _that_, at the end of the day, is the more important lesson. 


End file.
